B. Kadeda Burgess

WHO SHE IS:

Administrative Assistant, Office of Regulatory Affairs

YEARS AT PENN: 6; 4 in her current role.

WHAT SHE DOES: Burgess collects research submissions from principal investigators, research coordinators and students, puts together the proposals and disseminates them to the right place. “I love to see the younger ones come in who are going for their Ph.D’s,” she says.

QUESTIONS SHE GETS ASKED: Most queries are about the status of a research project submission—and if there’s anything the researcher can do to speed up the review process. Burgess also puts nervous new researchers unfamiliar with the process at ease. “I’m like the information center,” she says.

WHAT SHE LIKES ABOUT HER WORK: Burgess says she’s a kind of tour guide for researchers, which is fitting, because she has a background in international travel, having led group tours to Brazil and the Caribbean in her life before Penn.

Penn Current Express

Quoted Recently

“As we know from the research, the performance of a large firm is due primarily to things outside the control of the top executive. … We call that luck. Executives freely admit this—when they encounter bad luck.”

—J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, on how executives can influence a company’s value. Limited research on the topic has mostly found that broader market forces often have a bigger impact on a company’s success than an executive’s actions. (The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015)